Robert Soucy (born June 25, 1933) is an American historian, specializing in French fascist movements between 1924 and 1939, French fascist intellectuals Maurice Barrès and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, European fascism, twentieth-century European intellectual history, and Marcel Proust's aesthetics of reading. Biography Robert J. Soucy was born in Topeka, Kansas. His father was a fruit and vegetables peddler and his mother a former farm girl. Soucy graduated from Washburn University in 1955, was a Fulbright scholar in Dijon, France in 1956–57, received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1957 and was an Intelligence Officer in the United States Air Force 1957–1960. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1963, was an instructor at Harvard University 1963–1964, an Assistant Professor at Kent State University 1964–65, and an Assistant and Full Professor at Oberlin College 1966–1998. He has served on the Editorial Board of the journal French Historical Studies. He is a professor emeritus of History at Oberlin College. Participation in the debate over French fascism Soucy has been a controversial figure in the scholarly debate over French fascism, several of his interpretations differing from those of most French historians who have written on the subject. Soucy disagrees with arguments that fascism in France in the late 1930s was primarily a synthesis of nationalism and socialism ("neither right nor left"), that French fascist movements of the period were "marginal", and that Colonel François de La Rocque's Croix-de-Feu/Parti Social Français (CF/PSF) was too socially, economically and culturally conservative to be fascist. The importance of the CF/PSF to the debate over French fascism derives from the fact that CF/PSF was the largest political movement on the French Right in 1937 with a party membership greater than those of the French Communist and Socialist parties combined. Soucy acknowledges that some French fascist movements (such as Gaston Bergery's Front Commun and Marcel Déat's "Neo-Socialists") were more left than right (if only for short periods). But he maintains that the largest French fascist movements of the interwar period—Georges Valois' Faisceau, Pierre Taittinger's Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité française, Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français and La Rocque's CF/PSF—were strong defenders of social conservatism and upper class economic interests. Soucy contends that former leftists who joined these movements soon became ex-leftists, that the actual social-economic goals of these fascisms ran from conservative to reactionary (including Doriot's movement after 1937), that their major financial backers were from